Impact socks on day 4 – AKA The Day the CICS Explorers found a CICS Explorer

Posted on behalf of Nick.

The Tom Rosamilia and Phil Weintraub ‘Ask z Experts’ session was very well attended – below you can see Mr Zemblowski and Catherine Moxey center back row, Steve next to the linen-suited dapper Mr O’Dowd.

Phil W appears to be taking council from Anthony O’Dowd – no doubt asking why, if the Message Broker can handle scoring at events like Wimbledon and the Ryder Cup why can’t we use it to resolve the integration of a hung Parliament in the UK.

Meanwhile is looks like Tom R is praying that our very own Em James knows the answer.

Looks like Sue has found her badge at last – hope she kept hold of her passport! You don’t want to lose your passport while on a business trip…..

Now look who our intrepid explorers have run in to – our real live genuine CICS Explorer Joe Winchester!

That’s just about it now, flights home on Saturday and back to Hursley next week – must start work on that hit single now we’ve absorbed some American culture.

Impact socks on day 3

Posted on behalf of Nick.

Our intrepid CICS Explorers have been checking out the Super Woman’s Reception – I think Tom was expecting lycra and super powers.

While they were there they bumped in to Yvonne Perkins, VP for Enterprise Platform Systems (EPS) who wished to pass their Best of British wishes to her.

After all the socialising it was time to hit the bar and a glass of red, room temperature of course.

Many people you see here are walking around with colourful buttons adorning them (click the image for a close-up).

I must say I liked the Connectivity Cowboy one, although cannot claim any input to that particular badge, but here are the ‘sacks’ of badges waiting to be taken up.

Now it was time to scope out the food – so we went for a closer look.

Then it was off to play the machines.

Some people lose their shirt gambling, this chap lost his head by the look of it!

But Tom and Sue decided to see what they could get with their winnings- is Ford country some kind of music?

Obviously someone got upset because the next thing we know is Security arrived….

We just hope they let us out in time for tomorrows sessions, particularly Phil Wakelins security talk which will include the new feature recently made available for CICS TS V4.1, ID Propagation. Also, what should be an entertaining session from Will Yates – Old stager Vs Greenhorn and a look at how the CICS Explorer can help and for those of you who missed Fraser’s Dynamic Scripting session there’s a repeat!

Impact socks on day 2

Posted on behalf of Nick.

So after the excitement of day one and the 200+ attendees to Dave Andrews opening, our intrepid CICS Explorers get down in to the more detailed technical sessions.  To back up the technical sessions, as well as the Ask z Expert sessions, there are demo’s being provided in the IBM System z Software Solutions Suite.

After a quick chat with the CICS Business Partner Supremo, Diane Johnson (@dianegjohnson), it was off to the solution center to see what freebies there were check out all the rich complementary products to the CICS family.

First stop was the Hostbridge stand (doing more with CICS) – nice comfy chair and check out that guitar behind us – looks like a ’57 Les Paul to me

Next we visited those fine people who used to be called Fair Isaac, now known as FICO.

Now with all the new stuff CICS keeps putting in to it’s products it gets increasingly hard to stay up to date with it all, so it’s important that we have companies offering education and instruction of how to take advantage.

So after a hard day around the event it was time for our Explorers to put their feet? up. The ideal solution to this was to relax in one of the bars.

We spent some time analysing what was on offer for Day 3 and saw Catherine Moxey was giving her CICS Events pitch, Fraser had a couple of sessions on CICS Web Services and Service Component Architecture as well as the exciting new announcement from CICS, a session on Dynamic Scripting, there’s an ILOG session from Matt Whitbourne (@mattwhitbourne) and Dan Donnelly as well as further education on CICS Events and implementation.However,  in addition to this there is the Tom Rosamilia session at 16:30 Creating an Agile, Dynamic and Cost-Effective Business With System z. and the ‘Ask z Experts 18:00 session with Tom and Phil Weintraub. Another full day ahead – in the words of that classic Greek philosopher, or was he Roman? Actually I think it the Magic Roundabout…. Zebedee “time for bed….”

Impact socks

I’ve been asked to publish this by Nick, who is just too nice to say no to. No socks were harmed (so far) during the creation of this content but I can assure you they will be given a good talking to when they return from their err.. adventures.

So having shamelessly plugged Impact 2010 on YouTube promo video here we are at Impact 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Venetian Hotel is the setting for most of the sessions and two stars of the Impact promotional videos have taken some time out to give a narrative of the first days proceedings. Sue and Tom have flown over from the Hursley Lab in the UK to be present at this years event along with several others speakers and attendees from the SW Lab in England. Dave Andrews, the CICS Development Director kicked off the CICS Track with a family update, featuring two key announcements made last week. The CICS Transaction Gateway V8 and CICS Dynamic Scripting no-charge feature pack.

Sue and Tom also heard about the exciting new Redbook that is available ‘Smarter Banking with CICS Transaction Server and were seen ‘mugging’ up on the book.

Next up it was time for food.

After lunch it was time to take the Solution tour.

Where upon we came across a nice bright shiny z10 – it’s big it’s black, the mainframes back!!

After that they decided to venture off and investigate the experts.

Here we found the resident CICS Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), Catherine Moxey.

There’s plenty going on here and for Tuesday we have Joe Winchester talking about the CICS Explorer and how it can be extended using the software development kit, Steve Zemblowski talking about upgrading your CICS TS, Catherine (when she’s not in the experts zone) talking about CICS Events, Dan Donnelly talking about ILOG Business Rules solutions and a couple of CICS Tools sessions, one featuring Jim White from Southern California Edison. So before the jet lag kicks in any further it’s off for some rest. 

India CICS Developer Conferences 2009

The first India CICS Developer Conference for 2009, based in Chennai, has just completed. Here we can see Dave Andrews (Director, CICS Products) during the opening keynote:

India CICS Developers Conference 2009 - Chennai

The second conference based in Bangalore, will start on December the 10th. If you hurry, you might still have time to register. (Note that this link will only be available until the end of the week).

Also launched was the India CICS User Group developerworks space. If you want to find out more, go here and get involved.

Dave arrived last week and spent some time before the conference with his TXSeries team in IBM Bangalore. If you want to see part of the team responsible for producing and supporting TXSeries, here you can see them all in an all-hands meeting with Dave:

TXSeries Team in Bangalore

GSE UK conference – let’s chat!

This Wednesday, sees the start of the Guide Share Europe (GSE) UK conference and I’m going to be there along with quite a few other IBM Hursley employees from the CICS team. Assuming there is reasonable internet at the venue, I’m hoping to take some time to blog about the event while I’m there. I’m hoping to get chatting with a quite a few of you as well while I am there so if you want to meet-up for a chat, please get in touch via the blog or on twitter (@chrishodgins), I’ll try to check both as much as I can during the conference. Other than that I should be lurking around at most of the CICS presentations.

The conference has a nice varied agenda covering 9 different streams so there should be lots to take in! The streams are:

1. CICS
2. IMS
3. DB2
4. Enterprise Security
5. MQ
6. Large Systems Working Group
7. Network Management Working Group
8. Software Asset Management
9. New Technologies

I only managed to convince one other sucker colleague from the CICS team to join me for a mugshot on the blog to make it easier to track us down. So without further ado, keep your eyes peeled for one lanky Scotsman (that’s me – left) and Kevin Bowkett (on the right).

Chris Hodgins

Kevin Bowkett

Kevin is a first line manager for CICS with responsibility for Web Services, SCA, Web 2.0 and Java. He has the pleasure of taking the first CICS presentation on Wednesday morning, which is the CICS TS 4.1 overview. This is definitely one to catch so you have a nice grounding for the rest of the CICS presentations over the 2 days.

On the Thursday afternoon, I’ll be presenting on CICS Explorer aka “The new face of CICS”. So please feel free to grab me at any time or after the presentation to have a chat about it.  I’m primarily a CICSPlex SM developer and lately one of the main developers on the CICS Management Client Interface. So if you need to get your head around any of that lot you know where I am. I’m happy to talk about anything else CICS related as well.

Both Kevin and myself will be about on Wednesday and Thursday. So see you there!

CICS

IMS

DB2

Enterprise Security

MQ

Large Systems Working Group

Network Management Working Group

Software Asset Management

New Technologies

IBM business partners receive letter of thanks

Congratulations to all of IBM CICS business partners who received letters of thanks at Share! The letters were presented for sponsorship and support of CICS. I have a lovely collection of photos of the awards being handed out below. In order of appearance we have Calvin Fudge of DataDirect, Guy Givens of H&W, Dan Speer of Hostbridge Technologies and Ed Boulay of Sirius.

DataDirect receiving their letter of thanks

H&W receiving their letter of thanks

Hostbridge Technologies receiving their letter of thanks

Sirius receiving their letter of thanks

Also check out the great DataDirect blog, where they have beaten me to it and published a picture of Calvin Fudge, Director of Marketing for the Shadow Product Group receiving their letter of thanks and shaking hands with CICS director Dave Andrews. They even have an image of the letter of thanks on there as well!

Well done to you all!

Update 24/09/09: Fixed some bad grammar (CH)

IBM System z Expo (Oct 5th-9th) in Orlando, Florida

*Puts on marketting hat*

Straight from the home of Mickey Mouse and Universal studios – Orlando, Florida just became even better! Yup, the IBM System z Expo is going to be in town from October 5-9th this year.

You can even get a 10% discount by entering the promotion code A2N when you enroll. Everything you need to get registered and more is right here:

IBM System z Expo – http://bit.ly/16sbo9

From looking at the contents of the conference, there is a lot of new tech in there. Obviously the new System z10 and all the latest skills updates for that is on the list. So too is cloud computing which just about everyone who is cool is trying to work on right now ;), as well as virtualisation, Parallel Sysplex and Linux making big appearances. Also fairly relevant in the current climate there is also a focus on reducing costs. So how much can they pack in to those 4 1/2 days? Well apparently 300 sessions including hands-on labs, birds of a feather sessions and great opportunities to speak with developers and other subject matter experts.

I suspect you might need to take a couple of days vacation to recover from all of that!

Day 2 at Share 2009, Denver

Day two starts on the CICS track with an Event Processing pitch by Scott Clee.

Scott Clee aka Mr January

Who by slide 3 had already had about 12 questions. Mainly these centered around his pronunciation of the word processing (pro-cess-ing or proh-sess-in) – he was backed up by knowledgeable locals in the session – Steve Zemblowski and Ed Addison.

Day 1 at Share 2009, Denver

CICS Marketing manager, Nick Garrod (@cicsfluff) has kindly agreed to throw away his buzz-words and shiny marketing foils to give us a little peek at what is going on at Share 2009 this week. If you are visiting Share and spot him, please go have a chat and demand he puts your picture on the blog! 🙂  Thanks to Nick and everyone out at Share! Now over to Nick for day 1 at Share. More to follow as I get it…

Thanks
Chris

CICS is well in evidence at Share 2009.

CICS banner at Share 2009